LA Escena Festival 2020

Join us for the second edition of Los Angeles’ Festival of Hispanic classical theater, now in a largely virtual mode. Presenting Hispanic classics, from inventive productions of the original texts to translations and adaptations inspired by the Golden Age.

LA Escena is Los Angeles’ first festival of Hispanic classical theater, featuring staged readings, experimental re-imaginings, and adaptations of works from Golden Age playwrights on both sides of the Atlantic. The festival celebrates the comedia—witty seventeenth-century dramas that deal with issues of class, gender, sexuality, and urban life—in many forms and seeks to showcase their continuing relevance to today’s audiences. As part of Diversifying the Classics, LA Escena promotes an expanded vision of the classics onstage and Hispanic culture in the theatrical canon.

LA Escena 2020 will include innovative digital performances by performers around the world, site-specific experiences that explore Los Angeles’ vibrant and diverse culture/history, and the fifth edition of the Golden Tongues adaptation series—new explorations of Hispanic classical plays by LA writers in partnership with Playwrights’ Arena. Blending the classic and the cutting-edge, the Old World and the New, LA Escena will bring audiences together for a virtual celebration of the theater’s unifying power across cultures and distances.

Thursday, November 12

5PM PST | Finjamos que soy feliz, presented by Teatro Clásico MX & Caracoles Teatro | Mexico City, Mexico

Tania and Oscar, the main characters on this voyage, must adapt their acting style to explore this complex text, which takes the powerful figure of sor Juana Inés de la Cruz as its starting point as it considers feminism, inclusivity, and the impediments to free thought, which the Mexican nun defended so passionately in her own time. 

Friday, November 13

4PM PST | Don Carlos: Prince of Asturias, presented by Oscar Emmanuel Fabela | Los Angeles, United States
Based on Ana Caro’s El Conde Partinuplés

Don Carlos was heir to the Spanish throne after the most powerful king in Spain, King Phillip II, but Carlos’ unusual physique and personality, as well as his ostensible sexual deviance, made him unfit to rule in the eyes of an intolerant Spain. Don Carlos was seen as different and therefore immoral, thus the Royal Court would stop at nothing to ensure that Don Carlos never ruled the mighty, pure, and golden kingdom of Spain. Even his father, King Phillip II, would go to extremes in attempts to erase Don Carlos from history. Will Don Carlos fight for what is right, or succumb to his own eradication?

6PM PST | Golden Tongues I: The King of Maricopa County, presented by Playwrights’ Arena

The King of Maricopa County, by Mary Lyon Kamitaki, is an adaptation of Lope de Vega’s El castigo sin venganza (Punishment without Revenge). In present day Arizona, near the border with Mexico, the politically conservative sheriff is up for reelection. His daughter from a previous marriage and his new wife are brought together by destiny: a car collision far out in the Arizona desert, in the middle of a thunderstorm. Their forbidden love, discovered by the vengeful sheriff, sets in motion a tragic series of events that shows the horrific consequences of power run mad.

Saturday, November 14

10AM PST | Quijotes y Sanchos presented by [los números imaginarios] & Bella Betalla | Madrid, Spain

Quijotes y Sanchos is a self-guided tour of Los Angeles. The experience begins at home, as participants receive their instructions through the free online messaging application TELEGRAM. We invite you to see your own space through the eyes of Don Quijote and Sancho, to relive the events of the novel, and to cross the city as though it were the Spain of 1604… or the Tokyo of the late 20th century. Quijotes y Sanchos turns your place and your city into the backdrop, you into the protagonist, and the rest of the world into the ideal cast for your journey. We will get you ready to walk a new world, and to become someone else for a morning. You will decide on your own route, your own personal and intimate wandering through Los Angeles. 

1 PM PST | Quijóteres Puppet Show, presented by Dragoncillo Puppet Troupe | United States

¡Quijóteres! is a bilingual puppet theatre adaptation of Cervantes’ classic novel that aims to introduce young audiences, regardless of their familiarity with Spanish or the Golden Age, to the comic adventures and themes of Don Quijote. Featuring “muppet-style” puppets on a unique, multi-functional traveling puppet stage, the show takes advantage of its imaginative puppet setting to emphasize the novel’s intensely comical depictions of the ridiculous, with all of the clashes and crashes, valor and vomit, that have distinguished Don Quijote as the quintessential funny book for more than four centuries. 

2 PM PST | Y es mayor dolor la ausencia que la muerte, by presented by grumelot | Madrid, Spain

Grumelot presents a virtual experience that reflects on what it means to be free while in seclusion, and to achieve our most intimate connections at a distance. This piece, designed for digital platforms, starts from the texts of Sor Juana, that “Tenth Muse” of Mexico, who sought out seclusion for the sake of intellectual freedom, and places them in conversation with 12 female artists as they experience their own isolation during the Great Lockdown of 2020 in Spain.

6 PM PST | Golden Tongues II: The Woodingle Puppet, presented by Playwrights’ Arena | Los Angeles, United States

Julie Taiwo Oni’s riff on Miguel de Cervantes’ Retablo de las maravillas (The Marvelous Puppet Show) reimagines the anxieties around social and cultural belonging in the space of a rapidly gentrifying South LA. In The Woodingle Puppet Show with Host Mr. C, as Constructed by Mr. Asinine with Calculations and Articulations of the Genius Sort, Oni explores questions of Blackness, and the hoops people are willing to jump through to prove that they are “black enough.”

Sunday, November 15

10AM PST | Quijotes y Sanchos presented by [los números imaginarios] & Bella Betalla | Madrid, Spain

Quijotes y Sanchos is a self-guided tour of Los Angeles. The experience begins at home, as participants receive their instructions through the free online messaging application TELEGRAM. We invite you to see your own space through the eyes of Don Quijote and Sancho, to relive the events of the novel, and to cross the city as though it were the Spain of 1604… or the Tokyo of the late 20th century. Quijotes y Sanchos turns your place and your city into the backdrop, you into the protagonist, and the rest of the world into the ideal cast for your journey. We will get you ready to walk a new world, and to become someone else for a morning. You will decide on your own route, your own personal and intimate wandering through Los Angeles. 

3PM PST | Canciones de Olmedo, presented by Jóvenes Clásicos & Teatro del Soho Caixa Bank | Málaga, Spain

Canciones de Olmedo is a musical adaptation into concert form of Lope de Vega’s famous play The Knight of Olmedo. Our company, Jóvenes Clásicos, paints with language, just like a painter uses paint on canvas—our goal is to paint a scene for the audience’s delight. Our point of departure is the musicality of the verse, inherited from the epic verse and troubadour poetry of the Middle Ages. The Knight of Olmedo, composed in the 1620’s and widely regarded as Lope’s masterpiece, was actually inspired by a popular song, which describes the death of a knight: “They killed him by night, the pride of Medina, the flower of Olmedo.” We offer you Canciones de Olmedo as a reminiscence of the flavor of Lope’s poetry—a melancholy, nostalgic song to love and the end of love.

6PM PST | Golden Tongues III: What We Pay For Likes, presented by Playwrights’ Arena | Los Angeles, United States

How does who we are shape what we see and believe? Inda Craig-Galván’s What We Pay For Likes transports the squabbling, reputation-obsessed aristocrats of Madrid from Juan Ruiz de Alarcón’s Los empeños de un engaño (translated by Diversifying the Classics as What We Owe Our Lies) to a Calabasas populated by influencers whose lives revolve around their brands and social media views. When a handsome stranger comes to town, their relationships IRL turn out to be much more complicated than their polished profiles suggest. And how do the purveyors of media manipulate those distinctions?

Monday, November 16

RED BULL THEATER and DIVERSIFYING THE CLASSICS present Lope de Vega’s

4:30 PM | The Courage to Right a Woman’s Wrongs, presented by Red Bull Theater | New York, United States

One of the Spanish Golden Age’s most accomplished female playwrights, Ana Caro, presents a witty critique of society through the story of Leonor, a woman who sets out to find her one-time lover (Don Juan, naturally) and bring him to justice. The Courage to Right a Woman’s Wrongs is a comedy of wild intrigue and lively ingenuity in which Leonor crosses geographical boundaries and defies social expectations of gender in order to bring her fickle lover to justice and restore her lost honor.

Diversifying the Classics is delighted to announce the second edition of Los Angeles’ Festival of Hispanic classical theater, LA Escena 2020, now in a largely virtual mode.
Since launching our biennial celebration in 2018, we have been planning for this new opportunity to present Hispanic classics, from inventive productions of the original texts to translations and adaptations inspired by the Golden Age. 
Amid the devastating theater closures over the past few months, we have been impressed by the resilience and creativity of artists who have found possibility in adversity. The new forms and collaborations that have emerged in recent months inspire and entertain, and we are excited to share innovative works that draw from centuries of tradition to find closeness and connection despite our current distancing.
This special-edition, largely virtual festival includes artists from Mexico City, Madrid and Málaga in Spain, as well as New York and Los Angeles in the US, all exploring new directions in theater practice across a number of platforms.
While the pandemic makes it impossible to bring the international and East Coast artists to LA in person this time, they will be with us in work taking place mostly online and via an exciting site-specific, socially-distanced experience created for LA.
Though we will all miss the chance to experience LA Escena in person, this virtual version will reach an audience across the globe. We have also established new partnerships to make this all possible—in addition to our original association with UCLA, A Noise Within, and Playwrights’ Arena here in Los Angeles, we have also received support from Acción Cultural Española AC/E, Hispanex, Teatro Soho CAIXA Bank (Málaga), Teatro de la Abadia and Nave 73 (Madrid), and the Festival de Almagro.
We hope you will join the LA Escena 2020 program online November 12–16 for a unique and unforgettable experience. Despite the physical distancing, the show must go on, in English and in Spanish, in your place as in mine. We are so excited to convene, and look forward to seeing you there. 

Barbara Fuchs
Artistic Director, LA ESCENA
Director, Diversifying the Classics
Professor of Spanish and English, UCLA

FESTIVAL CREDITS

Members of Diversifying the Classics: Barbara Fuchs, Marta Albalá Pelegrín, Javier Patiño Loira, Paul Cella, Rafael Jaime, Saraí Jaramillo, Robin Kello, Laura Muñoz, Rhonda Sharrah, Cheché Silveyra, Aina Soley, Samantha Solis

Artistic Coordination and Production in Spain: Lorenzo Pappagallo

SUPPORTED BY

UCLA Arts Initiative
UCLA Division of Humanities
UCLA Department of English
UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese
UCLA Center for 17th-  & 18th-Century Studies 

IN COLLABORATION WITH: